A police helicopter takes off from a backyard Sunday after picking up personnel who searched a wooded area in Saranac, N.Y. The search goes on for two killers who cut their way out of a northern New York prison.

DANNEMORA, N.Y. — The intense manhunt for two escaped murderers in far upstate New York has hit its 10th day as a woman charged with helping the killers flee from prison heads back to court.

Prosecutors say Joyce Mitchell, a prison tailoring shop instructor who had befriended the inmates, had agreed to be the getaway driver but backed out because she still loved her husband and felt guilty for participating.

“Basically, when it was go-time and it was the actual day of the event, I do think she got cold feet and realized, ‘What am I doing?”’ Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wylie said Sunday. “Reality struck. She realized that, really, the grass wasn’t greener on the other side.”

Mitchell was charged with helping Richard Matt and David Sweat escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border on June 6. She was due in court this morning in Plattsburgh.

Wylie said there was no evidence the men had a “Plan B” once Mitchell backed out, and no vehicles have been reported stolen in the area.

That has led searchers to believe the men are still near the maximum-security prison in Dannemora. At the same time, Gov. Andrew Cuomo cautioned that for all anyone knows the convicts could be in Mexico, where one of the inmates had fled after killing his boss in the 1990s.

Mitchell, 51, was charged Friday with supplying hacksaw blades, chisels, a punch and a screwdriver. Her lawyer entered a not guilty plea on her behalf. She has been suspended without pay from her $57,000-a-year job overseeing inmates who sew clothes and learn to repair sewing machines at the prison.

Wylie said Sunday that the killers apparently cut their way out using tools stored by prison contractors, taking care to return them to their toolboxes after each night’s work.

The convicts used power tools to cut through the back of their adjacent cells, broke through a brick wall, then cut into a steam pipe and slithered through it, finally emerging outside the prison walls through a manhole, authorities said.

More than 800 law enforcement officers went door-to-door over the weekend looking for the escapees. Sweat, 35, was serving a life sentence without parole for killing a sheriff’s deputy. Matt, 48, was doing 25 years to life for the kidnap, torture and dismemberment of his former boss.